Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Reflection upon the religious dimension of human experience became prominent in Russian thought during the nineteenth century, though it had long existed in the form of saints’ lives and related writings issuing from the country's strong monastic tradition. Awareness of the need for a type of reflection which could accommodate the insights of Orthodox spirituality and which promoted the integral nature of the person, ‘wholeness’, ‘integrality’ or in Russian tsel'nost , was expressed in a celebrated article by the Slavophile thinker Ivan Kireevskii (1806–56) entitled ‘On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy’. Petr Chaadaev's Philosophical Letters , written in 1829 and first published in 1836, had set in motion the increasingly acrimonious dispute that marked Russian polemical writings during the nineteenth century, between advocates of emulation of West European society, the Westernizers or zapadniki , and those convinced that Russia possessed social structures and spiritual values, adherence to which would secure the nation's welfare, the Slavophiles or slavyanofily . This dispute, still pursued in the post-Soviet era, amounted to a quarrel regarding what form of society, West European or Russian, provides the optimum conditions for the growth of the human personality (lichnost). These matters engaged the minds of religious and secular thinkers alike, ... log in or subscribe to read full text